Home to thousands of guerrilla fighters in the 1960s, the spectacular limestone caves of northeast Laos are now open to travellers
Bomb craters, now filled with ripening maize, pockmarked the entrance to the cave of the man said to be invincible.
“The Americans tried to bomb him so many times,” said Somkhit, my guide, as we stooped inside Khamtay Siphandone’s wartime lair, “that a myth spread he couldn’t be killed”. He never was.
Inside, I entered a dimly lit world once forbidden to foreigners. Concrete blast-walls, 1.5m thick, shielded the sparsely furnished office and living quarters of the Pathet Lao’s former military supremo.
We descended deeper through an interconnecting tunnel dripping with stalactites. Eventually it mushroomed into an immense cavern that once billeted 2,000 troglodytic troops. Sheltered underground for nine years, they’d listened to an airborne enemy they would never see pound the diminished horizon of their limestone world with such ferocity it makes recent aerial assaults in Iraq and Afghanistan seem tame by comparison. I was at the very heart of the ‘Hidden City’.
I’d travelled nearly 1,000km overland to reach Vieng Xai’s cave city in north-eastern Laos’ remote and scarcely visited Hua Phan Province, joining a trickle of travellers taking the mountainous route from the Mekong Valley in the south to Hanoi in north Vietnam. I’d been quickly captivated by Laos’ simplicity: folds of bottle-green forests, villages of stilted huts teeming with children and unruly piglets, and stacked terraces of rice-paddies. Yet the further I ventured, the clearer it became: something devastating had once occurred here.
As the world watched events unfold in neighbouring Vietnam in the 1960s, actions in Laos were no less apocalyptic. The so-called ‘Secret War’ is a story scarcely told. A decade of fighting for control of Laos had pitted the CIA-backed royal government against Pathet Lao’s pro-North Vietnamese communists.
Then in 1964, completely unbeknown to an American public fixated on Vietnam, the US Air Force ratcheted up the conflict, launching the most sustained bombing campaign ever known. In nine years more bombs rained down on Laos than the US dropped on Japan and Germany combined throughout the Second World War. To borrow an infamous quote about Vietnam from US General Curtis LeMay, Laos was ‘bombed back to the Stone Age’.
Quite literally, as the Pathet Lao’s leadership and 20,000 followers retreated like cavemen into Vieng Xai’s caverns.
These days, fragrant jasmine and frangipani rather than cordite sweeten Vieng Xai’s air. And even American travellers are welcome. It’s more than 30 years since the war ended yet north-eastern Laos has scarcely recovered. Its infrastructure remains poor and explosive-clearance teams work unceasingly to remove a deadly legacy of UXO (unexploded ordnance) still maiming farmers and playful children. With incomes little more than US$1 (50p) per day, the SNV (a Dutch NGO) and the UN’s World Tourism Organisation have been developing the local tourist infrastructure with the aim of making Vieng Xai’s remarkable caves a centrepiece attraction.
Yet anyone sauntering through peaceful Luang Prabang might think such tales of wartime carnage complete nonsense. I almost did. As they have for centuries, days in Luang Prabang begin with an orange thread of shaven-headed monks shuffling in silence to collect alms between the royal palaces and glittering 16th-century spires of monastic wats (temples). The dawn’s cool is a false promise. Soon the Mekong’s drenching humidity moistens the city’s greenhouse vegetation of banana palms and swollen durian fruits. By dusk, thousands of light bulbs illuminate the night-market and croaking frog choruses hold sway. This World Heritage-listed city bears no scars of wartime damage. Its pro-royalist sympathies spared it bombardment.
A chance encounter, however, suggested the conflict hadn’t been so distant. I’d crossed the sluggish Mekong to visit Wat Tam Xieng Maen’s Buddhist cave, where I met an elderly man.
“Vous êtes CIA?” he asked.
“No… English,” I replied, surprised. He looked disappointed.
“J’étais un Montagnard,” he continued, explaining how he’d been part of a local defence force unit, the Montagnards, once covertly trained by the CIA to carry out sabotage on the communists. Most were from primitive subsistence hilltribes. “The Americans left us to the communists,” he whispered, before strolling away.
Xieng Khuang Province, by contrast, hadn’t fared so well. A further day’s journey north – crossing a mountainous watershed inflamed by flashes of tamarind flowers – the landscape broadened into a fertile vale of rice-paddies worked by buffaloes dragging ploughshares. Named the Plain of Jars (huge stone containers of unknown origin were found scattered about the area), it was once the most heavily bombed place on earth.
Flat ground was rare so the area was coveted by all warring factions. Repeated incursions by the communists were repelled by bombing aimed at halting a tide of North Vietnamese troops flowing south towards Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). The plain was said to have resembled a moonscape: shorn of greenery by the defoliator Agent Orange.
Meanwhile, Phonsavan – a town of 60,000 people where I’d arrived for the night – has not a single building pre-dating 1975.
Its residents have also developed a highly cavalier attitude towards discarded munitions. I saw grain barns adapting missiles as upright supports, while my own US$3 (£1.50) per night hotel used ashtrays made from bombies (cluster-bomb cases) and the key fobs were spent machine-gun cartridges. The following morning I breakfasted at Crater Café, its veranda lined by 225kg bombs packing more punch than my super-strength Laotian coffee.
Before continuing, I arranged a tour of the ancient funerary jars, which lend the plain its name. UXO contamination has largely kept visitors away from what is one of Asia’s most unique and exciting archaeological sites. Several thousand stone jars are strewn across the area, some 2.5m-high. They’ve baffled archaeologists as no human remains have ever been found inside these 1,500-2,000-year-old urns. One site near Phonsavan has dozens of them amid zigzag trenches once occupied by Vietnamese fighters. Several massive bomb-craters indicated a devastating aerial response.
Given such destruction, I wondered exactly what might lay ahead as I journeyed northwards, travelling deeper into the Pathet Lao heartland. What I actually found was Laos’ very own shangri-la.
Beyond Xam Neua, a breathtaking plateau of limestone pinnacles reminded me of forests of jagged peaks around Yangshuo in southern China. The bases of streaked grey cliffs were swathed in maize fields, with small fishponds where buffaloes wallowed in chocolate-brown mud holes. Our truck stopped occasionally to pick up Hmong women with flamboyantly coiled headscarves, hauling baskets of knobbly cucumbers to Vieng Xai market.
There, my journey over, I jumped off into a colourful maelstrom of tribal people trading among mounds of mangosteens and rambutans.
From 1964 to 1973 the besieged Pathet Lao and 23,000 followers made this small village the capital of their fledgling state, using its natural caves for refuge. Vieng Xai still remains highly politicised. In the bombastic jargon of any self-respecting socialist state it’s known as Na Kham Thampet (Town of the Diamond Caves), allegedly named because of the ‘crystal-sharp minds’ of the revolutionary leadership. Near my quirky guesthouse – a stilted shack on a lake with paper-thin walls that rattled when my neighbour snored, and tilapia swimming beneath the floorboard cracks – was a lofty stupa topped by a red star.
Occasional hammer and sickle flags fluttered around town while a few older men wore the black pyjama uniform so associated with the Viet Cong.
“There are 468 caves in Vieng Xai; 200 were occupied during wartime,” explained cave-guide Somkhit, who caters to the seven Western tourists Vieng Xai receives, on average, daily. After we’d heard a potted chronology of the war, the sheer organisation of the cave city soon became clear. Heading to the first of the tour’s six cave complexes, Somkhit pointed out a bakery cave, a foreign visitors’ cave, a bank cave (where ‘liberated zone’ banknotes` were printed), a circus cave (where I imagined tightrope-walking tricky under sustained bombardment), and even a Chinese Embassy cave (surely the ambassadorial posting from hell?).
Over nine years the city flourished, despite daily bombing, kept alive by contraband convoys filtering prodigious quantities of aid and armaments from China, the Soviet Union and Cuba, via Vietnam.
The tour takes in the residences of the Pathet Lao’s ruling seven-man politburo. Outside each cave are attractive gardens of bamboo, figs and a maroon shrub called hom deng that, when boiled, made a poultice to treat burns.
First up, the cave of Kaysone Phomivane – the former Pathet Lao general-secretary and later president of Laos. Blast-walls shield his cave’s 140m-long chamber, which is divided into rooms by concrete partitions. In one, Somkhit cranked the handle of a still functioning Soviet oxygen machine that provided breathable air if rock-falls ever sealed them in.
The most important rooms in all Vieng Xai are where the war’s outcome was plotted. Kaysone’s office is nostalgically red.
There’s a bust of Lenin and a portrait of Che Guevara given to him by visiting Cubans, while a copy of Essays of Lenin (ironically in French, Laos’ old colonial language) rests on his desk. On the wall of the nearby cabinet room, history is frozen in time as a map plots an attack on Long Chen air base – an American installation once so secret the CIA deceived the US Senate for years about its existence.
We spread out our picnic of sticky rice, sheep’s livers, dried buffalo jerky and sour plums on the lawn of a pink and green modernist-style mansion belonging to the war’s most colourful character, Prince Souphanouvong. The ‘Red Prince’, son of the ruling king, had eschewed luxury and his dynastic birthright to join the communists. It was like Prince Charles joining the Revolutionary Workers Party, disappearing down Wookey Hole, and plotting his mum’s overthrow. But Souphanouvong’s royal volte-face cost him dearly. A white stupa in the grounds bears memorial to his young son who was killed during a failed CIA-sponsored assassination attempt in 1967.
The caves are quite spartan so it was the stories Somkhit told that brought them to life. At times I could almost hear the thunder of TNT rattling the stalactites. Or patriotic songs sung from massed political rallies resonating around the vast 300m-long Xanglot Cavern. Then silence. Somkhit’s lucidity comes from bitter personal experience. He was born 58km away at Ban Khwan, close to the Vietnamese border.
“I remember being very frightened as a child whenever the airplanes flew over,” he recalled. “The worst part was the anti-aircraft gunfire from Vietnamese stationed in our village. We would all scatter and hide in a cave whenever they fired.”
But the rawest experience of the tour came at the Hospital Cave. Although not officially opened, Somkhit took us there. At the back of a maize field hoed by farmers, he pushed open bulky 2m-thick steel doors to reveal the shattered remains of a 100m-long ward with blue-washed walls. With no lighting, it was eerie. A few shattered bed-frames once tended by Cuban doctors remain. Most amazingly, our feet crunched a sea of glass: broken vials of medicine, syringes and still-sealed ampoules of morphine littered the floor.
These days, Vieng Xai remains sedated – but naturally so. The population is barely half its wartime level. The next day I wandered contentedly along the levees of rice-paddies and backwater paths through limestone pinnacles and lush pastures, retreating at lunchtime to my lakeside guesthouse for a cold Beerlao and feu (noodle-soup). I was tempted to hop across the fields to explore the many overgrown caves but this is ill-advised as the threat of UXO remains.
The daily market is also a colourful affair. Different ethnic Laotians come into town to sell their produce – some 27 Austroasiatic tribal groupings are recognised around the district. There are darker-skinned Khamu, the complex Lao Tai tribes (differentiated by threads of colour on their clothing or whether they’re Buddhist or Animist) and Hmong.
One of the little-known tragedies of the conflict saw these ethnic Laotians pitted against each other. Somkhit had made no mention of this so it was hard to know just how wounds had healed. But the Hmong hilltribes in particular, lead by the charismatic General Vang Pao, had died in tens of thousands fighting the Pathet Lao. It’s said after the war ended in 1975 with the victorious Pathet Lao declaring the new Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the remaining Hmong faced reprisals or fled into Thailand as refugees.
I’d heard a traditional Hmong village lay a few kilometres south of Vieng Xai, so decided to visit. Renting a Chinese-made jinlang (scooter) for the day, I bounced along mud-baked tracks into a countryside I’d so far only admired from a bus. The succession of trackside villages was heavenly.
Underneath the raised floors of Muang Nga’s tall homes built on stilts, women wove bright fabrics on traditional wooden handlooms. At Xieng Sou, I limped into the village with a puncture. A monk with a permanent cigarette jarred between his lips supervised my tyre’s repair, while I avoided a sharp downpour inside an open-sided Buddhist temple gilded with serpents and dragons. Monsoon was coming.
The 3km track to Jakien was sticky and slippery, but eventually I slid into the hilltop Hmong village where the huts’ long thatches trailed to the ground. Just a few startled children and mothers were around to say hello; most of the older women I’d passed were walking to market while the men worked the paddies. Residents were outnumbered by cattle, turkeys and pigs dozing beneath little stilted grain-stores. It was hard to believe that a few generations ago their people had traded hoes for machine-guns in the battle for this exotically beautiful country.
Back at Vieng Xai’s visitor centre, 72-year-old Onechanh Sommany was holding court. He was pointing out a black-and-white propaganda poster on a wall depicting his wife in heroic pose aiming a rifle skywards.
A lifelong Pathet Lao member, he was a senior figure in their command and had survived all nine years underground during the bombing. He’d even married his wife in a subterranean service in 1970.
“The planes came everyday in daylight in groups of eight,” he relived, as the centre’s TV opportunely showed a chilling cockpit video from a B52 bombing-run. “Sometimes the caves would shake as we cooked or worked… but it was our life and we grew used to it”.
He explained how people tended their crops at midnight outside the cave. “Although dangerous, it was a relief to go outside as the caves were so cold and wet in winter many people became ill.”
“So how do you feel about the Americans now?” I asked.
“I have forgiven them,” he sighed. “I’m proud of my struggle to save my country, even though it was a drop in the ocean. Now I want visitors to come to understand our sacrifices.”
